Glitch is Dead, Long Live Glitch!

Glitch art, which continues a long twentieth-century tradition of expressionism, renders format through creating what is thought to be a computational error. The terms Glitch Art and Dirty New Media have been often used with reference to each other, or even used interchangeably, referring to the same artistic projects, or to similar theories-practices.

Yet those annoying technological blips -- like when your CD skips, when the picture on your old TV goes fuzzy, or when you upload that digital image and it shows up all green and fragmented -- are the very inspiration, the material and the centerpiece of discussions on Glitch Art and Dirty New Media. The music of EBM (Electronic Body Music), IDM (Intelligent Dance Music), rhythmic noise, Digital Hardcore, Dubstep, Post-Dubstep, and Microsound, Clicks & Cuts, Post-Techno, and Glitch Hop, are also ways of understanding where the Glitch Arts culture came out of it, is a cultural phenomenon.

In recent years, the current post-digital movement has grown to include dozens of artists who are defining new vocabularies within the digital media. Glitch feminism, in particular, is focused on the revolutionary potential of the digital technologies that create a glitch aesthetic, which allows new modes of self-determination and representation.

Nowadays we are still under the assumption that glitch art is political, employing a praxeological critique of particular ways of producing, consuming, and thinking about images within Cyberculture.

As we face AI generated imagery faster than the blink of an eye, it is quite urgent to think about what is Media Art, how do we engage our communities, how do we function as communities, and what does being a media artist in mediating cultures mean.

GLITCH CINEMA w. Ejla Kovačević [curator, HR] & Guests #fubar_expo #screening — GLITCH CINEMA w. Ejla Kovačević [curator, HR] & Guests

The glitch, certainly, retains an ever-present existence, an ever-present reminder of the force of newness, existing as both byproduct and revelation of those forces. Despite these ceaseless developments in image and sound quality, the glitch remains a powerful force, constantly re-emerging with every new medium. The digital sphere, therefore, does not swallow up everything that came before it entirely, but exists in symbiotic relationships -- feeding off of, and being fed by, other forms of media, with glitches acting like mulch and abrasion, with eventually recognisable technological limitations from earlier media becoming organs of digital aesthetics. Indeed, the failure has become the dominant aesthetic of much of late-20th-century art, reminding us that our control over technology is an illusion, and showing digital tools are as only as perfect, accurate, and effective as the humans that built them.

Artwork by Julia Makivic, game designer and creative technologist — **Artwork by Julia Makivic,** game designer and creative technologist

Starting today the 8th /'fu:bar/ glitch art exhibition is endeavouring into a new sequence of new media art processes and errors within. /’fu:bar/ is an annual program focused on electronic experiments and research in contemporary error-themed digital art and theory.

The group exhibition showing and sharing 267 art pieces by 231 artists and collectives from 53 countries will be complemented by a series of curatorial presentations and workshops. The physical installation will be held at the Institut Français En Croatie in Zagreb (October 28th – Nov 13th 2022) and ONLINE exhibition at the expo.fubar.space virtual venue (October 28th – Dec 31st 2022).

Marie Hinson, virtual reality cyberpunk, poet, artist and filmmaker. Corrupting across the binaries as hexe.exe.

This year’s iteration is focused on understanding and supporting different notions and modalities of digital+online IDENTITIES. The event is articulating this broad topic with a week of performances, workshops, talks and lectures by ~20 artists and collectives interleaved in interdisciplinary areas of digital networks, ethical computing and contemporary multimedia, presenting works by artists, activists and curators: Subota [HR], Z. Blace & (Open)GLAMwiki Croatia [HR], MFRU [SI], Janire Goikoetxea [ES], crash-stop [IE], andrei jay [US], Golubjevaite [NL], hexe.exe [US], Dina Karadžić & Vedran Gligo [HR], Glitchwerks [US], Teuta Gatolin [HR], Ejla Kovačević [HR], Julia Makivic [UK], Eyal Gruss [IL], Elektronengehirn [DK], tonota & varboska [HR] and more than a hundred artists from all around the world.

#hacklab01 An open hackerspace existing in Zagreb and on the internet ran by DIY tech geeks, activists and artists.

Two mighty reference books for Glitch Aesthetics:

Vito Campanelli, Web Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam and the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2010.

Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Verso Books, 2020.

Janire Goikoetxea [ES] – The sounds of Glitchcore + Thin Client, An Art Historian specialized in digital media and internet aesthetics.

Eyal Gruss, new-media artist and machine learning researcher

GLITCH CINEMA w. Ejla Kovačević [curator, HR] & Guests

AI-Generated text edited by Gloria Maria Cappelletti, editor in chief, RED-EYE

Images /fu:bar/ Press Office and info material provided as (CC) BY-NC-SA 4.0

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